Let me start by saying that I am not an artist. I dabble. I paint. I photograph. I crochet. I knit. I have even tried my hand at quilting – much harder than you think. In other words, I like to get my hands in there and do. Mostly, I admit, I write. I think this why I love art books so much. I envy the creativity and skill of the artist as much as I admire them. In this way, I am always looking for a good book about art. Right now, I am looking for a good book to introduce art to a younger crowd. Over the past ten years a great number of books have been written about artists, a particular media of artistry, poets and writers which usually include creative art pieces of their own, and world art for a younger reader. Some of these books fall short of invoking the art that they are portraying; others are grounded and impress upon the reader the significance of the art. Andres Belloli’s Exploring World Art is one of the good ones.

Belloli chose not to introduce art chronologically through art movements, instead she took the major themes of art: time, spirituality, daily life, history, and nature, and topically organized her book under these themes. I found this method worked very well because sometimes theme gets lost under the obligation of doing justice to the movement or the history behind the particular movement. Themes are very important because they give us that first step into understanding why art is made and what the viewer should be looking for.

I bring up being concise a lot in my reviews because I think that when exploring something new with a younger crowd you need to be able to get right to the facts without burying them with words. Art is about looking and learning from what you are looking at. I like that Belloli’s description are short, usually a page, and that there are so many small side-bars to focus the reader on a particular feature of the art. The How Were They Made boxes of information are especially helpful to get the audience thinking about the process of creating art.

Exploring World Art by Andrea Belloli is definitely a book that I would keep in my classroom whether it is Art or History or even English. Visual stimuli can be very useful when you are reading (there is a reason that they put pictures in books since the time of the illuminated manuscripts) because it gives students and all readers another way to absorb information. I once had a creative writing teacher who used pictures to get our brains kick-started, as he put it. He would give us a picture and then we had to write about it in a single paragraph or outline. The exercise successfully drew the students in his class into a creative mood and from it he could introduce his lesson with a class that was stimulated and engaged in what he was telling us. I think “The First Moving Pictures” section of Belloli’s Exploring World Art could be an especially good visual kick-start. The section explains Galloping by Eadweard Muybridge. The piece shows a horse galloping in a set of single frame images. One of the most extraordinary of the stills shows how at one point during the gallop all four hooves are in air giving the impression that the horse is flying.

Give Exploring World Art a gander and while you’re at it Belloli also wrote/co-created Make Your Own Museum, which I also read and tried out, that introduces how museums work and gives school aged students the ability to create their own museum with collections of art they can stick on the walls. I think it is a good exercise before actually going to a museum with a class or, as I did, with the young people in your life. They had a whole new appreciation for the museum and the people that work in one. ( )